Fanpeng Kong

Research Assistant

The University of New South Wales, Canberra

Biography

I am a research assistant in the School of Engineering and Information Techology, The University of New South Wales at Canberra under the supervision of A/Prof. Andrew Lambert. My research focuses on adaptive optics for Astronomy, especially wavefront sensing of atmospheric turbulence using the combination of holographic or Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor (WFS) and field-programbale gate array (FPGA) devices.

Besides research, I am also interested in electronics (embedded system, FPGA), general programming stuff and enjoy exploring other tools to improve my productivity such as Emacs and Org mode.

Recent Posts

This blog describes how I set up email in Emacs with the help of mbsync, mu and mu4e. First of all, I need a program to synchronize emails in my local drive with the server. There are several options for this purpose, with two of the most popular ones being offlineimap and mbsync. I actually tried offlineimap first and was able to make it work together with mu and mu4e. There are two methods to specify the password of email account in offlineimap’s or mbsync’s configuration files.

I have been using Emacs for about 2 years until now, yet I have never looked insight to elisp seriously. I know that understanding elisp could make my life in Emacs much easier. Though I tried to read the first several chapters of An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp within Emacs, but soon found out that I totally forgot what I just read without the practice of applying them in my real life.

To set up a clean and easy to manage Python development environment on Mac OS X (or more generally - a Linux-like working environment), I try to obey the following guidelines:
Use Homebrew as the package management tool. General tools or system wide packages are installed through Homebrew.
Install Python 2 and 3 (including pip) from Homebrew. Though Python 2 comes with OS X by default, but the version might be lower and may be changed due to OS X upgrade in the future.

One problem I came across when I try to use Org mode as the markup language for my Pelian generated static blog is the syntax highlight for source code blocks. Org mode has the ability to highlight syntax of languages supported in its Babel functionality, be it in the Org mode buffer or the language major mode buffer, or exported PDF document or HTML file. However, things became a bit different for Org mode when it was used in Pelican through the org_reader plugin.

To keep the fonts of a matplotlib figure consistent with surrounding
context in a LaTeX file, I need to set the size of the figure correctly
in advance. Otherwise, scale the figure later to fit it into the LaTeX
file will alter the fonts in the figure as well. Here is a useful link I
found http://nipunbatra.github.io/2014/08/latexify/.